I believe without the Jewish state of Israel and the Islamic Republic of Iran the Middle East would have been a much more hospitable, diverse, progressive, stable, and tolerant place.
This is probably an axiom that anyone who studies the Mideast knows but very few people dare speak. Of course the response is always a permutation of: Holocaust, drive the Jews into the sea, anti-Semite, and never again. This of course completely misses the point, because do I wish Iranians were driven into the Gulf?
Israel is a foreign and synthetic entity implanted into the Mideast due to complexities of European history. It was formed by the mass migration of people whose roots in the region are so tenuous that they are likely non-existent. And they had to drive off people whose roots in the region predate even the ancient Hebrews'. But once the Jewish refugees had settled in historical Palestine they probably established an intrinsic right to live on that land and to practice their religion and culture and be first grade citizens.
But that was not enough. Jews had the right to statehood. Why? Because of reasons that had nothing to do with the Mideast. And because Jews had weapons and the cover of a very freshly and rightfully guilty Europe, Israel was allowed to ethnically cleanse Palestine, so that Israel would not only be a state for Jews, but would be a Jewish state. This sharp stab at the heart of the emerging Arab nations would reverberate to this day.
Yes, Israel's initial conception was not of a religious state, but it was one of a mono-cultural society. And Israel's practice has lead it down a path where it has become an expansionist, apartheid morass of right wing extremism. I recently got into the habit of following a diverse collection of Israeli Twitter accounts, and I was truly shocked. Israelis are not the Westerners I thought they were, they are not the secular self examining progressive people I imagined them to be. In fact, they mostly remind me of Muslim extremists. They are entirely focused on picking on Muslim societies so far away they have never had any interaction with Israel. They spend all of their time finding absurd parallels with absurd situations to justify the most absurd actions of Israel. And they truly and completely and consistently define their country's conflict as a conflict with Islam. As someone who has spent a lot of time reminding Arabs that the Arab-Israeli conflict is at its core a secular conflict over land and people, I was shocked to discover that perhaps the instigation of a religious view of the conflict is not as Arab driven as I once thought.
But as damaging as Israel's presence in its current form has been to the region, I believe it might have ended up well. After Sadat's initiative for peace, I believe enough pressure could have been accumulated on Israel to accept peace based on a two-state solution at a time when the West Bank was still salvageable. In return there would have been complete normalisation with Arab states. In a way this almost feels like it should have been inevitable. Instead something in the middle happened and said pressure never materialised, Israel instead went down its insane extreme right wing path and destroyed the territorial integrity of the West Bank, leaving itself in a situation where it either becomes the new Republic of South Africa or it becomes (gasp) a minority Jewish country.
That something was the Iranian revolution. In fact it wasn't even the revolution itself but a short period where everything went wrong and Khomeini lead the country down a path of adolescent auto-pilot. As Khomeini glided along with the unplanned and catastrophic US embassy hostage crisis, he directed the Iranian revolution in a direction it was not necessarily destined to take. As he glided along improvising he thought it would be a great idea to export the Islamic revolution. So there we went as Iran stabbed a scythe of influence and agency across the fertile crescent from Iraq to the shores of Lebanon.
The influence of Jewish Israel and Islamic Iran on the region has been disastrous. In Lebanon in the eighties they laid the groundwork for what the region could expect in years to come. It was not, in fact, Syrian "occupation" that lead to some of the more disastrous chapters of the Lebanese civil war. It was the agency to Israel by the phalange and to Iran by the budding Hezbollah that tore the country apart and would continue to this day. In Syria, the Baath regime was not always, as some insist, a minority controlled regime. In fact it was a despotic but secular regime that underplayed sectarian differences and kept the awkward state of Syria glued together through Arab nationalism. It was the decision by Assad senior to make Syria an agent of Iran that started the decomposition of Syria allowing the disastrous Syrian "revolution" to mushroom beyond anything the Islamist uprisings of the 70's could present. In Iraq, US instituted ballotocracy brought an Iranian proxy government dominated by Shiites which stressed sectarianism way more than Saddam ever did. Leading inevitably to ISIL.
What's really interesting is that the conflict between Israel and Iran and their neighbours is not an ancient conflict as western media dutifully recites. In fact Arab countries and Iran had excellent relations with Iran under the Shah. If the Iranian revolution had not happened, there is a very high possibility that in the absence of political tension, Muslim sectarian differences could have been mended. Israel also did not have to turn the conflict into a religious conflict. Certainly from Arab perspectives the conflict did not start out religious, but under constant pressure from Israel the PLO mutated into Iranian sponsored Hamas. While Israelis might think that turning the conflict religious helps them accumulate international support, they must realise they reside in a region that is becoming increasingly hostile and increasingly dangerous.
The way out for Iran is straight forward: Iran must abandon its self proclaimed role as the protector of Shiites in the Arab world. It must stop conflating religion and geopolitics, because ultimately it has worked against both its interests and the well-being of Shiites in the region. For Israel I don't know if there is a way out any longer. The way out was always the two-state solution. Everyone always knew the parameters of said solution: Contiguous land for Palestinians at exactly 67 borders, sharing Jerusalem and water, limited right of return for Palestinian refugees to historical Palestine, and normalisation with the Arab world. The west knew this was the solution, the Arab world knew it and proposed it explicitly in the Arab initiative, and even Palestinians knew it and endorsed it. But Israel has been on a suicidal path enabled by the US to destroy any possibility of this solution through settlements in the West Bank. The Israelis are convinced that the current state is sustainable, while some convince themselves that the Bantustans/enclaves in the West Bank can be a sustainable Palestinian state. The truth is, Israel is heading down a very disastrous path, and its friends are not helping it much by their enabling.
